Sudbury 'incel' attacker told cops: 'I was going to kill a child'
BY HAROLD CARMICHAEL
BY HAROLD CARMICHAEL
SUDBURY — The woman Alex Stavropoulos stabbed in the neck and nearly killed June 3 at the Michael’s parking lot in Sudbury was not his intended victim.
The woman’s infant daughter in a stroller was.
“I was angry at white women,” assistant Crown attorney Leonard Kim read from a transcript of the video statement Stavropoulos gave to Greater Sudbury Police after the late-afternoon attack that saw the woman require emergency surgery to deal with a severed artery in her neck.
“I like white women, but they won’t f*** me. So, I wanted to see what it felt like (to kill a female child) … I had my mindset. I was going to kill a child and was waiting for the right opportunity.”
On Monday, Stavropoulos, 26, who has been in custody since his arrest, pleaded guilty in the Ontario Court of Justice at the Sudbury Courthouse to two counts of attempted murder and one count of breach of probation (possessing a knife outside of his residence).
During the 90-minute sentencing hearing, Stavropoulos sat in the prisoner’s box with his head looking down and between his hands. He showed no emotion.
Stavropoulos was not sentenced Monday.
That was because Kim told the court the Sudbury Crown’s office would be looking into having Stavropoulos designated a dangerous offender.
A dangerous offender designation is reserved for Canada’s most violent criminals and sexual predators.
Crown attorneys can seek the designation during sentencing and must show that there is a high risk the criminal will commit violent or sexual offences in the future. That designation carries an automatic prison sentence for an indefinite period, with no chance of parole for seven years.
Greater Sudbury Police officers collect evidence at the site of a stabbing incident outside the Michaels store on Marcus Drive on June 3, 2019. A woman and child were injured, while the suspect, a man, also injured himself, police said. JIM MOODIE/Postmedia
As a result, Stavropoulos will appear in video bail remand court Jan. 23, at which time a date for a hearing before Ontario Court Justice Ronald Boivin will be held on the Crown’s motion for a dangerous offender designation.
If Boivin rejects the Crown motion, regular sentencing would then occur.
However, if Boivin approves the Crown motion, Stavropoulos will undergo a psychiatric assessment by a forensic psychiatrist. Once that report is ready, the local Crown’s office has to decide whether to seek permission from the provincial Attorney General’s office to proceed with its dangerous offender application.
In his video statement, which Kim read to the court, Stavropoulos told police he was “not psychotic.
I’m not psycho. No … I’m not experiencing hallucinations.”
Stavropoulos said he identified as an “involuntary celibate” or an incel.
“I don’t get laid,” he said. “I wanted to kill for one reason. I don’t know why … I was just waiting for the right opportunity (in the Michael’s parking lot). I saw a couple of kids and didn’t do anything. I just need to do it, do something like this.
“I just saw her (adult female victim) and made a quick decision. She had a child and a little one … Just something in my head (said), ‘You have to go. Just go. Don’t be a wussy.’”
Stavropoulos also said in his video statement he realized that to kill the young female in the stroller, “You have to kill the mom because they are going to protect the child.”
In the agreed statement of facts read in by Kim, the court heard Stavropoulos took a Greater Sudbury Transit bus to Home Depot the afternoon of June 3 where he purchased a package of utility knives. Outside the store, he took two out, threw the package and the bag it was in in the grass, and walked across to the Michael’s parking lot area.
Stavropoulos then went into the Old Navy store for a short time, left and then paced in the Michael’s parking lot for some time. He then spotted a woman leaving the store with a female baby in a stroller and another young daughter at her side about 3:45 p.m.
When the woman got to her vehicle and the young girl jumped in, the mother was in the process of unbuckling the baby from the stroller when Stavropoulos grabbed her hair and began stabbing her with a utility knife.
He also attempted to stab the baby in the stroller.The woman yelled for help and fought Stavropoulos, attracting the attention of Brent Holder, who was seated in a nearby vehicle. Holder approached Stavropoulos, who backed away from the scene, slit his own throat with a utility knife and fell to the ground.
In the video statement, Stavropoulos indicated that due to his large size and the fact Holder was holding something in his hand, he thought Holder was an undercover police officer.
Holder, in addition to subduing Stavropoulos until police arrived, also took away two utility knives Stavropoulos had.
Crystal Bouliane, a family medicine resident at Health Sciences North, meanwhile, rushed to the injured woman’s aid. With blood spurting out of the woman’s neck, Bouliane got a First Aid kit out of her vehicle, applied pressure to the wound to slow the blood loss and called 911.
“She was bleeding profusely,” Bouliane told the 911 operator who handled the call, which was played in the courtroom right after Holder’s 911 call.
The 35-year-old mother was taken by ambulance to Health Sciences North having lost a considerable amount of blood and her vitals falling. Doctors discovered that the vertebral artery in her neck had been severely damaged and was unrepairable. The artery was subsequently closed off and the woman required a significant amount of blood to replace what she had lost.
Kim told the court that had individuals not intervened in the attack and aided the woman, she would have bled to death.
The Star is not publishing the woman’s name and her young daughter’s name at the request of family members who attended court Monday.
The nine-month-old female child, meanwhile, was found to have some bruising and minor cuts. The older daughter was unharmed.
Stavropoulos, despite inflicting a 15-centimetre cut across his neck, was treated at the scene by paramedics and cleared to be taken into police custody.
A search of the area by Greater Sudbury Police officers turned up the discarded Home Depot bag with the utility knife package with one knife still inside.
At the time of the stabbing incident, Stavropoulos was on a twoyear probation order issued in the summer of 2018 that included a condition he was not to possess knives outside his home.
Stavropoulos is the same man police officers dealt shot during an incident at the downtown transit terminal on April 1, 2018.
On Aug. 8, 2018, Stavropoulos pleaded guilty in the Ontario Court of Justice possession of a dangerous weapon. He received a time-served penalty (99 days of pre-trial custody) and a two-year probation order.
The court heard Stavropoulos was in a marijuana-induced psychosis and was drinking heavily when he entered the terminal on April 1, 2018, threatened a security guard and a transit worker with two knives, and then charged at police.
Stavropoulos, who was chanting “white power” during the incident, was struck by a conductive energy weapon and shot, collapsing in a pool of blood.
An errant bullet punctured a metal panel in a wall and a piece of shrapnel embedded itself in the leg of Phil Kingsbury, a transit driver working in a supervisory capacity that night.
Kingsbury had taken refuge inside the security office in the middle of the building, along with Andrian Santos, a guard with G4S Secure Solutions. Kingsbury was treated at hospital and released.
THE INCEL MOVEMENT
Incels, or involuntary celibates, promote the misogynistic idea that men are entitled to have sex with women.
Incels are members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom.
Alek Minassian, the man accused of killing 10 pedestrians and seriously injuring 16 others as he drove along a busy Yonge Street sidewalk in Toronto in 2018, also allegedly identified as an incel.
Other killers in the U.S. and other parts of the world also identify as incels.
